Vous êtes sur la page 1sur 28

Philosophical Review

What an Emotion is: A Sketch Author(s): Robert C. Roberts Reviewed work(s): Source: The Philosophical Review, Vol. 97, No. 2 (Apr., 1988), pp. 183-209 Published by: Duke University Press on behalf of Philosophical Review Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2185261 . Accessed: 24/01/2013 16:37
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

Duke University Press and Philosophical Review are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The Philosophical Review.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded on Thu, 24 Jan 2013 16:37:19 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

The PhilosophicalReview, Vol. XCVII, No. 2 (April 1988)

WHAT AN EMOTION IS: A SKETCH Robert C. Roberts


EMOTIONS

The

followingare factsan accountof emotions'mustaccomall of them. In modate. No currenttheory accommodates

this paper I outline a view which I think accounts for them. Some of these claims are controversial, and I shall argue for them when appropriate. 1. In the paradigm cases; emotions are felt. Furthermore, there is a strong inclination to identify the feeling with the emotion (analogously with: The feeling of a pain is the pain). But unlike pains, emotions are not always felt, being sometimes "subceived" and sometimes wholly beneath consciousness. 2. Emotions are intentional states, and have propositional objects in the sense that what the emotion is about, of, for, at, or to can in principle be specified prepositionally. 3. Some emotions have typical physiological concomitants, some of which are to some degree felt; and people are sometimes inclined to identify the feeling of the emotion with the feeling of these changes. 4. Typically an emotion depends on the subject believing some state of affairs to obtain (for example, A would not fear this spider if he didn't believe it likely that the spider is harmful); but this is not always so: Sometimes we experience an emotion despite not believing its propositional content. 5. Some emotions beget dispositions to kinds of actions; so references to such emotions are often a powerful way of explaining actions.

'This paper is chiefly about emotions as occurrencesrather than dispositions, and "tokens"rather than "types."
183

This content downloaded on Thu, 24 Jan 2013 16:37:19 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

ROBERT C. ROBERTS

6. The subject of an emotion is both a) sometimes able to exercise voluntary control over it and b) sometimes unable to do so. 7. Emotions are typically experienced as unified states of mind, rather than as sets of components (for example, a belief + a desire + a physiological perturbation + some behavior). Amelie Rorty has asserted that "emotions do not form a natural class." In stressing their resistance to classification she gives this list: fear, religious awe, exuberant delight, pity, loving devotion, panic, pride, remorse, indignation, contempt, disgust, resignation, compassion.2 The present essay, in which I argue that emotions are serious concern-based construals, can be read as a qualified challenge to her thesis. Loving devotion may escape the net of my those theory, as may some forms of exuberant delight-namely that depend heavily on artificial chemical alteration of the central nervous system. A number of items that do not appear in her list, but would appear in those of some theorists, may also not be captured by my account. Psychologists occasionally include the startleresponse and the orienting reflex as emotions, as well as amusement at jokes. Others would consider clinical depression and clinical euphoria to be emotions. Robert Solomon, in his "emotional register,"3 includes a number of items that don't seem to me to be emotions, though I acknowledge they are all closely related to, or involve, emotions: Indifference, duty, faith, friendship, innocence, and vanity. Gilbert Ryle lets in avarice, considerateness, patriotism, kindliness, and laziness.4 Steven Ross includes generosity, obsequiousness, and loyalty.5 I shall not try to account for just anything any philosopher or psychologist calls an emotion. But I think my account encompasses occurrences of embarrassment, anger, shame, envy, gratitude, hope, anxiety, jealousy, grief, despair, remorse, joy, and resentment, as well as the items from Rorty's list

2Explaining Emotions, edited by Amelie 0. Rorty (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1980), p. 1. 3ThePassions (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1977), pp. 280-37 1. 4The Conceptof Mind (New York, N.Y.: Harper and Row, 1949), p. 85. 5"Evaluating the Emotions," Journal of Philosophy 81 (1984), pp. 309-326. 184

This content downloaded on Thu, 24 Jan 2013 16:37:19 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

WHAT AN EMOTION IS: A SKETCH

about which I expressed no doubt: That is, everything that is indisputably and paradigmatically an emotion. I don't claim that every true proposition using the emotionwords in my approved list refers to an emotion. A number of them may sometimes refer to character traits or other emotion dispositions ('Jane is a jealous person"). There are also trivial, conventional, and stretched uses: "I envy you your red socks," "I'm sorry you had to wait," "I pity the woman who marries him." Also, I don't claim a perfect fit between my theory and "ordinary usage" of "emotion." That there can be so much disagreement among philosophers and psychologists about what belongs in the class suggests that ordinary usage is not an infallible guide to whatever concepts may be lurking here. But what I call emotion has vast overlap with what is ordinarily called emotion; and it does constitute a natural class. My enterprise can be seen as respectfully tidying up ordinary usage.
FEELINGS

It is almost a truism among philosophers today that "emotions aren't feelings." Seldom is much trouble taken to say what kind of feelings emotions aren't, but such items as tightness in the chest, a prickly or flushing sensation on the neck or face, awareness of perspiring or clamminess, an uncomfortable glowing feeling in the midsection, and generally the sensations characteristic of what physiological psychologists call "arousal," come to mind.6 That such feelings are not emotions follows from fact #2: Anger, hope, fear, and gratitude are, like beliefs and desires, necessarily about, of, or for something, whereas feelings of flushes, prickles, gnawings, and constrictions embody no such reference beyond themselves. From the fact that feelings of arousal are not emotions, it doesn't follow that no feelings are emotions, or that no emotions are feelings; maybe there are other kinds of feelings. The first part of #1 claims that emotions are sometimes felt, and this is different from the claim that a person having an emotion sometimes feels something. To accommodate the commonsense belief that emo5"It seems likely that the feelings to be associated with emotions are the subjective registering of the physiological changes." William Lyons, Emotion (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1980), p. 212. 185

This content downloaded on Thu, 24 Jan 2013 16:37:19 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

ROBERT C. ROBERTS

tions themselves can be felt, we must find a sense of "feel"which allows for this. Gilbert Ryle has displayed part of the variety of feelings in an essay7 in which he distinguishes, and then draws connections between, seven different senses of "feeling": 1) Perceptual. Someone feels the temperature of the bathwater. 2) Exploratory.I feel in my pocket for my keys. 3) Mock-perceptual. The condemned man "feels" the noose around his neck, though he is eating breakfast in his cell. 4) Sensory. We feel aches and tickles. 5) Of general condition. We have a non-localized feeling of being depressed, lazy, or sleepy. 6) Of tentativejudgment. The philosopher feels there's a flaw in the argument. 7) Of inclination. When I look over the presidential candidates, I feel like running myself. After discussing these categories of feelings, Ryle remarks, "I expect there are plenty more."8 Nor is it difficult to think of some more. Take the director who exhorts her chorus, "Sing it again, this time with feeling!" Ryle himself says feeling triumphant doesn't fit any of the categories. And it's a little odd that no category in his list encompasses feeling an emotion. A couple of times he mentions emotions (indignation and anger) in connection with feelings of general condition, but it seems wrong to assimilate feeling angry with feeling sleepy or ill or fidgety, or even with feeling depressed. However, in these last two cases we are onto the border of intentional states-it is sometimes fitting to ask, "What are you feeling fidgety about?" or "Why are you depressed?" (where we are requesting a reason, and not just a cause). Let us take a hint from Ryle's mention of feeling triumphant to explore another category of feelings, which has some features in common with emotions. Other members of this category would be feeling self-confident, self-righteous, awkward, guilty, incompetent, ripped off, and excluded. These feelings depend, more than feeling sick or lazy do, on the person's taking himself to be in a certain condition or taking himself to have a certain property. While my feeling sick may depend on my construing myself as sick, it does not necessarily depend on this; and I can feel depressed without construing myself as depressed. But I can't feel incompe7"Feelings" in CollectedPapers, Volume II (London, England: Hutchinson, 1971), pp. 272-286. 81bid., p. 276. 186

This content downloaded on Thu, 24 Jan 2013 16:37:19 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

WHAT AN EMOTION IS: A SKETCH

tent or excluded without construing myself as incompetent or excluded. These we might call feelings of construed condition, or feelings of self-estimate. Dogs may feel fluish, lazy, or depressed. But since they have no concepts like awkward, guilty, and triumphant, we are safe in thinking they have no feelings of awkwardness, guilt, and triumph. Perhaps we can get clearer about feelings of construed condition if we look at another kind of experience that depends on construal. In PhilosophicalInvestigations9Wittgenstein discusses a kind of visual experience which is not a visual sensation. He says, "I contemplate a face, and then suddenly notice its likeness to another. I see that it has not changed; and yet I see it differently. I call this experience 'noticing an aspect'" (p. 193). One "sees an aspect" of a face by construing it "in terms of" another face, in something like an act of imagination.'0 The analogy with feeling awkward is instructive: Just as one experiences something about the face by letting the other face "inform" it, so in feeling awkward one experiences oneself in certain terms, or in a certain connection (perhaps in connection with some paradigm of awkwardness). The experience of "seeing-as" is most graphically illustrated with simple drawings like the duck-rabbit that Wittgenstein discusses in this context. Just as seeing the duck-rabbit as a duck is not merely knowing that it can be seen as a duck, nor merely judging that it can be so seen, but is construing it as such," so the person who feels triumphant is not merely judging that he is triumphant, but is construing himself as such. Construing seems to involve dwelling on or attending to, or at a minimum holding onto, some aspect, for example, the duckiness of the duck-rabbit or one's triumph. It seems to mean bringing some perceived paradigm, or some concept or image or thought, to bear. In the case of seeing the duck-rabbit as a duck, or of feeling triumphant, it is to bring some such thing experientiallyto bear.
9Translated by G.E.M. Anscombe (New York, N.Y.: The Macmillan Company, 1953), pp. 193ff. '0For an enlightening discussion of imagination in such applications, see Peter Strawson, "Imagination and Perception," in Experience and Theory, edited by Lawrence Foster and Joe William Swanson (Amherst, Mass.: University of Massachusetts Press, 1970). " I can judge that the figure is duck-like while seeing it as rabbit-like; this is most obvious in the case where I make the judgment on the basis of somebody's testimony, while being unable to "see" it for myself. 187

This content downloaded on Thu, 24 Jan 2013 16:37:19 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

ROBERT C. ROBERTS

The kind of construing involved in having a feeling of construed condition is less tied to sensation than seeing the duck-rabbit as a duck, or hearing a series of four notes as the opening of "Yankee Doodle." In the latter cases, the description of the construing makes definite reference to a sense-experience. But the person who "views" himself as triumphant or awkward does not need to be looking at himself in the mirror, hearing himself speak, or having any kinesthetic sensations. No sense-experience that one might mention seems to be the "vehicle" for the construal. But construing oneself as triumphant or awkward is not sufficient for feeling triumphant or awkward. Such a construal seems to be necessary to the feeling, but is not the whole story. If I am very philosophical about my awkwardness in a French conversationthat is, if I have no great stake in speaking graceful French-I may be vividly aware of my awkwardness without feeling awkward. Similarly with triumph: Imagine a jaded old senator who hasn't been unseated in the last forty years. He runs once again, this time more out of habit and a mild distaste for the prospect of retirement than out of enthusiasm for his work or the contest, and wins the election. Upon hearing of his victory he construes himself as feeling triumphant. Lacking in these two triumphant-without cases is a concern about being in the condition one construes oneself to be in. To feel self-righteous one must want to be (or to be thought to be) morally superior. To feel guilty one must dislike being guilty. A feeling of construed condition, then, is the kind of mental state we were looking for: An intentional feeling. It is an "in-termsof" experience grounded in a concern. It is not a sensation that accompanies this "cognition,"'2 but it is this concern-imbued "cognition" itself. To feel guilty is not to have a feeling (for example, a twinge, gnaw, curdling, or throb) from which I infer that I am feeling guilty, as I sometimes infer from an abdominal burning sensation that I must be anxious. Since the feeling of guilt just is

12J put "cognition" in scare-quotesto signal that this usage may be questionable. The word does not have well agreed-upon boundaries, but it is perhaps usual that a mental event is a cognition only if it has one or more of the following characteristics:a) it is truth-asserting,b) it is inferred as I am using the from some other datum. By this standard, "construal," word, does not denote any cognition.

188

This content downloaded on Thu, 24 Jan 2013 16:37:19 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

WHAT AN EMOTION IS: A SKETCH

the concernful construing of oneself as guilty, it is in the strongest sense possible the feeling of guilt, and not a feeling which accompanies guilt. We can now say what feeling an emotion is. Feelings of construed condition are very similar to emotions, and may be thought to be emotions. But there are a couple of differences. First, feelings of construed condition seem to be, as their name implies, essentially feelings; whereas emotions are not. People can be episodically angry without feeling so. But no one feels triumphant without feeling so. It may seem that the analogue of being angry without feeling so would not be feeling triumphant without feeling so, but being triumphant without feeling so. But being triumphant is not an intentional state at all; so it cannot be the unconscious complement of the feeling of triumph. The emotions most notorious for occurring unfelt'3 are the "negative" ones focused on its psychotherapy. Thus therapists make diagnostic reference to an individual's unconscious guilt or grief, anger or resentment towards parents, or fear of success or of death, and spend large stretches of their professional lives getting envious, angry, resentful, and disappointed people to feel their emotions. We hear less about people with repressed joy, hope, and gratitude; and tend to think that if people don't feel joy, they don't have it. But probably we are misled in this by focusing on cases of easily self-admissible joy: If I am glad at the death of a rich uncle, I may very well refuse to feel it. Perhaps I felt it initially and then, horrified, repressed it thereafter; the episodic character of the joy might be evidenced in behavior that is best explained by reference to it. Thus, though the feeling of triumph is essentially a feeling, there seems to be no reason to rule out unfelt episodes of an emotion correspondingto the feeling of triumph. This first difference between emotions and feelings of construed condition is, then,

'3Having an emotion without feeling it does not, of course, rule out at the moment of having the emotion-in the case of feeling something anxiety, for example, muscle tension, intestinal upset, increased heart rate. That one can feel these concomitantsof anxiety without feeling anxiety shows 1) that feelings of these states are not by themselves feelings of emotion; and by implication 2) that these states are onlyconcomitantsof the emotion and not the emotion itself. 189

This content downloaded on Thu, 24 Jan 2013 16:37:19 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

ROBERT C. ROBERTS

chiefly one of vocabulary. We have no word for the state of mind of concernfully construing oneself as triumphant while not feeling triumphant, whereas we do have analogous vocabulary for the full-fledged emotions. One case especially bears out the closeness of these categories: Guilt-feelings are clearly feelings of construed condition, and yet it is widely acknowledged that guilt can be repressed. What is repressed is of course not guilt in the sense of blameworthiness, but rather the emotion which we are fully ready neither to call guilt (since that is not an intentional state) nor to call feeling guilty (since people who have the emotion do not always feel it). Second, emotions are not, except incidentally, directly reflexive, whereas feelings of construed condition are always so. In the latter kind of case I construe myselfas triumphant, awkward, guilty, and so forth. If being angry is a construal, what is construed as offensive-and-culpably-so is not typically myself, but some other person or personalized agency such as God, the Pentagon, Moscow, or the Other Team. If my analysis of feelings of construed condition is correct, there can be intentional feelingsfeelings about or of myself. If so, it is only a small step to feelings about other things: Of anger at the government, of gratitude to my children, of envy of a colleague. CONSTRUALS A construal, as I use the word, is a mental event or state in which one thing is grasped in terms of something else. The "in terms of" relation can have as its terms any of the following: A perception, a thought, an image, a concept. I can perceive one face in terms of another, which I am also perceiving; or another, of which I am merely thinking; or another, of which I am forming an image; I can perceive a face in terms of a concept, like rugged or kindly;I can imagine my living room in terms of furniture in the store, which I am presently perceiving; or in terms of either the image or the thought of my parents' living room, or in terms of the concept grandiose or well-coordinated; or I can think of myself (which is quite different from imagining myself or perceiving myself) in respect of likeness to my father, whom I am presently perceiving; or in terms of an image, such as coming sweating and triumphant across the finish line; or in terms of a concept, like intelligent or moody.
190

This content downloaded on Thu, 24 Jan 2013 16:37:19 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

WHAT AN EMOTION IS: A SKETCH

Most of our experiences, as well as most of our unconscious states of mind, are a hard-to-specify structure of percept, concept, image, and thought. All such synthetic crossings of percepts, images, thoughts,'4 and concepts are construals; only some of these, however, are emotions. My formula is that emotions are concern-based construals or, to include a qualification I made a few paragraphs back, serious concern-based construals or, to speak more precisely but less well, verisimilar concernful construals -that is, construals imbued, flavored, colored, drenched, suffused, laden, informed, or permeated with concern and possessing a certain verisimilitude. By "verisimilar" I mean to say that the construal has, for the construer, the appearanceof truth, whether or not she would affirm the truth of the construal. To be angry is not just to see a person as having culpably offended; it requires a concern about some dimension of the offense, and possibly a concern about some dimension of the offender. To be afraid of heights is not just to see them as a danger to something-or-other; it requires that something I hold dear seem threatened. Nostalgia is not just grasping similarities with the distant personal past; it is grasping similarities about which I care. For this reason concerns, cares, desires, loves, interests, enthusiasms are dispositions to emotions,15 just as much as are beliefs, images, thoughts and concepts. Perhaps I can use the concept of a construal to clarify the idea of the "imbuement" of a construal with a concern. We can distinguish, in some cases anyway, the construal of an object from the object itself (the duckly-view of the duck-rabbit from the duckrabbit itself). Phenomenologically, however, a construal is not an
141 hope that enough has been said to show that Robert Solomon errs in attributing to me the view that emotions can be equated with thoughts. "'I Can't Get It Out of My Mind': (Augustine's Problem)," Philosophyand Phenomenological Research 44 (1984), p. 406. "Thought," as I use the word, object or a proposition denotes an occurrence to mind of something-an -where the occurrence is neither an image nor a perception. Some emotions are thoughts on this definition, insofar as thoughts are sometimes what is construed in some terms touching some serious concern of the thinker (for example, thinking of myself as just about to lose my job). But certainly not all emotions are thoughts. '5I make extensive use of this insight in Spiritualityand Human Emotion (Grand Rapids, Mich.: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1983).

191

This content downloaded on Thu, 24 Jan 2013 16:37:19 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

ROBERT C. ROBERTS

interpretation laid over a neutrally perceived object, but a characterizationof the object,a way the object presents itself. When I see the duck-rabbit as a duck, the figure itself takes on a ducky look. Similarly, the case of seeing an interviewer as threatening to me can be analyzed into my construing her as having great power over my life and having contempt for my answers on the one hand, and my having a big concern to get a job and esteem myself as a capable person, on the other. But if proposition #7 is true, phenomenologically the emotion is not a two-stage process in which I first perceive the interviewer as powerful, contemptuous, etc. and then add to this construal a concern that is somehow relevant to it. Rather the concern enters into the construal so as to characterize the appearance of the object. My view of that interviewer as powerful and contemptuous gives her a threatening look only if filtered through my concern to succeed. Thus my concern is analogous to one of the "terms" of the construal. Proposition #1 at the beginning of this paper notes that emotions need not be states of consciousness. The construal theory accommodates this fact, for construals can be unconscious. I frequently catch myself calling my brother by my son's name, and vice-versa, and take this as evidence that I see them in terms of each other. But I do not experience this construal; I know of it only by evidence. Another of my opening propositions was 6. The subject of an emotion is both a) sometimes able to exercise voluntary control over it and b) sometimes unable to do so. Solomon tends to deny the b) part of the proposition, holding that all emotions are voluntary actions; but in doing so he flies in the face of universal human experience, and, since he believes that emotions are judgments, commits himself to the dubious view that there is a class of truth-asserting states of mind (viz. judgments of the emotion type) which are always voluntary acts. Others think of emotions as events over which, by definition, we have no control; they fly equally in the face of experience and make nonsense of the practice of exhorting one another (and ourselves) to "pull yourself together," "let not the sun go down on your anger," etc. Proposition #6 is explained by the construal account of emotion. 192

This content downloaded on Thu, 24 Jan 2013 16:37:19 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

WHAT AN EMOTION IS: A SKETCH

If this account is correct, all emotional change is change in the terms in which the subject "sees" the world, including in this changes in the subject's desires and concerns. It will not necessarily involve changing one's judgments, though this will be one important way in which change of construal occurs. If we take a figure like the duck-rabbit as a simple paradigm of construal, we can make the point clear. At first a person may see the figure in only one of its aspects, being blind to the other. But once she catches on, she can shift back and forth at will between the construals of the figure. Similarly, a person at whom I am tempted to be angry may be regarded, quite at will, in various ways: As the scoundrel who did such-and-such to me, as the son of my dear friend so-andso, as a person who, after all, has had a pretty rough time of it in life, and so forth. If these construals are all in my repertoire, and in addition are not too implausible with respect to the present object, then the emotions which correspond to them, of anger, benevolence, and pity towards the boy, are also more or less subject to my will. On the other hand, some people remain blind to some of the aspects of certain figures, and so for them the experience of the figure in the aspect they are capable of has the character of a "passion," an experience over which they presently have no voluntary control. Sometimes a person may try for several moments, without success, to "see" something in a figure, and then suddenly he does see it. It "came," as we say; and in such cases we have clearly that odd mixture of passivity and activity so characteristic of our experience of emotions. Emotions are of course far more complicated than the construals of these simple figures. Whether an emotion is in our repertoire with respect to a given situation is a function of the character of the situation in its relation to our system of beliefs, our emotional history, our system of cares and desires, our habits of attention, our skills at conceptualization and visualization, and who knows what else. In some situations one emotion may be so compelling that we are (without the help of a friend or therapist, at any rate) virtually helpless in the face of it. The therapist or friend, by suggesting and fostering other possibilities of construal, may be able to liberate us from it by contributing to our emotional repertoire. Besides the direct control involved in just picking another construal from our repertoire, there are indirect ways of changing 193

This content downloaded on Thu, 24 Jan 2013 16:37:19 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

ROBERT C. ROBERTS

emotion. When facing that fearsome interviewer, try sitting up straight, leaning forward in a slightly assertive bodily attitude, looking her in the eye, and talking in an even voice. Doing so will make you appear (to the interviewer, but more importantly, to yourself) to be in control of the situation. You help out the prescribed construal by making the situation more plausibly construable in its terms. Taking clues from Robert M. Gordon,16 we can see the following as a pool'7 from which justifying conditions for calling emotions passions are drawn: 1) an emotion may be a way, or a product of a way, of being acted on (I was embarrassed by the publicity); 2) an emotion may be a state over which the subject does not have voluntary control; 3) an emotion may act on, or influence, the subject in various ways (for example, cause sweating, impede clear thinking or articulate speech, provide motivation for worthy endeavors). A main goal of Gordon's article is to establish that 1) does not entail 2) or 3). He does not deny that 2) and 3) are true, but does seem to think that 1) is all it takes to make an emotion a passion. Thus in his view, to infer that since emotions are passions they must be either beyond our control or states that we undergo, is to commit a fallacy.'8 While he is right that neither 2) nor 3) follows from 1), his analysis of the concept of passion seems false, if taken as an account of what people mean by calling emotions "passions." If it were true, why wouldn't we call states of seeing and hearing (especially ones that do not involve looking or listening) passions? These too are "ways, or products of ways, of being acted on" (p. 379). To
'6"The Passivity of Emotions," The PhilosophicalReview 95 (July 1986), pp. 371-392. '7This expression leaves open how many of the conditions need to be met to justify calling an emotion a passion, and whether any of the conditions in the pool is individually necessary. '8Gordon does not seem to allow for the possibility, which Solomon pushes so strongly, that under some circumstances an emotion may be an intentional performance with respect to a situation construable as for example embarrassing or angering: That I can simply choosewhether or not to be embarrassed, or angry. The construal theory accounts for this possibility. However, in most cases where embarrassment is chosen, one can still say that the embarrassment is a way of being acted on by the situation. By my act of construal I bring it about that the situation so acts on me. The only cases I can think of in which I would not be acted on in this sense would be "situations" that I concoct in my imagination for the purpose of embarrassing myself-a small class of cases, I take it. 194

This content downloaded on Thu, 24 Jan 2013 16:37:19 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

WHAT AN EMOTION IS: A SKETCH

say my emotion is a passion seems to imply that I am to some extent in, its grip or under its sway; and this means, I think, one or more of two things: That I cannot control the emotion (or at least have difficulty controlling it), or that it is influencing me.
JUDGMENTS

In normal cases of emotions in rational persons, one can point to a judgment that "corresponds" to the emotion. For a rational gardener anxious about her tomato plants due to a prediction of hail, we can infer that she judges her tomato plants to be in some danger from hail. If I resent my older brother's sneaking efforts to get control of the family fortune, we can usually infer that I believe that in his efforts my brother is wronging me. This fact has tempted some to think emotions are some kind of evaluative judgment or belief or combination of beliefs and desires.'9 This identification of emotions with judgments has been refuted by several authors, using three arguments of which I am aware. 1. Sometimes we disbelieve the proposition that would be affirmed in the judgment corresponding to our emotion. I am anxious about my children's safety, and remain so at the very moment of sincerely admitting that they are safe. Or I feel ashamed, but make the judgment characteristic of embarrassment. Or I feel an emotion contingent upon a belief I held in childhood, but have since rejected. These all seem to be cases of irrational emotion. But a mental state is no less an emotion for being irrational.20 So the general thesis "emotions are judgments" is false. Let us say that I grew up in a region of the United States where

'9For example, Solomon, op. cit.; Joel Marks, "A Theory of Emotion" Philosophical Studies 42 (1982), pp. 227-242. 20This form of argument against making judgment essential to emotion can be found in Frithjof Bergman's review of Solomon's The Passions, Journal of Philosophy 75 (1978); Cheshire Calhoun, "Cognitive Emotions?" in Cheshire Calhoun and Robert Solomon, editors, What is an Emotion? (New York, N.Y.: Oxford University Press, 1984); Patricia Greenspan, "A Case of Mixed Feelings: Ambivalence and the Logic of Emotion" in Rorty, ed., op. cit.; Stephen R. Leighton, "Feelings and Emotion" in Review of Metaphysics38 (1984), pp. 303-320; Robert C. Roberts, "Solomon On the ConResearch44 (1984), pp. trol of Emotions" in Philosophyand Phenomenological 395-403; and Jerome Shaffer, "An Assessment of Emotion," in American Philosophical Quarterly20 (1983), pp. 161-173. 195

This content downloaded on Thu, 24 Jan 2013 16:37:19 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

ROBERT C. ROBERTS

black people were regarded as sub-human, in a period when their social liberation was under way. I believed that their being elevated to a status of equality was unjustifiable and threatened the very fabric of white civilization and the racial purity of the true humanity. My emotions toward black people were then a mixture of fear, resentment, and contempt. Ten years later I have a graduate degree from an Ivy League university, where I have rubbed shoulders with some black people who are clearly my intellectual betters, and I have become convinced beyond any doubt that whatever inferiority the black population may display is a result not of nature but of cultural deprivation. But in certain situations I find my former emotions returning. When my sister's date turns out to be a beautiful burly fellow as black as pitch, my immediate response is that old revulsion and anxiety. When I find myself losing out in job competitions with talented blacks, a certain racial contempt (which I would of course never admit to anyone) twinges my consciousness fleetingly, until I "get hold of myself." I fight my racist emotions by talking to myself about my evidence that blacks are full members of the human race, of equal talent on the average with whites. This description suggests two possibilities of relationship between an emotion and its contrary belief, if the emotion is to be identified with a judgment. a). One possibility is that though I believe dispositionally that blacks are equal to whites, I judge episodically that blacks are not equal. But this interpretation does not fit the case. If I am reminding myself of evidence for the non-racist beliefs, surely these cannot presently be merely dispositional. But setting aside for the moment the fact that I explicitly remind myself of my anti-racist evidence, it seems to me that the fact that the emotion comes fleetingly and is experienced as alien counts against this interpretation. It suggests that I have not forgotten my dispositional belief that blacks are my equals; and also that my state of mind is less irrational than it would have to be if I both subconsciously accessed the dispositional belief and judged the denial of it to be true. Is it not more plausible to say that I do not believe blacks not to be equal with me; that instead, they only appear to me, in certain lights, not to be equal?-That their appearance of inequality is more like an optical illusion by which I am not taken in, than like an affirmation I would make about how things are? 196

This content downloaded on Thu, 24 Jan 2013 16:37:19 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

WHAT AN EMOTION IS: A SKETCH

b). A possibility that better fits my description of the case is that the contrariety between my beliefs is not between a dispositional and an occurrent belief, but between two occurrent beliefs-two judgments. This is suggested by the strategy of trying to talk myself out of my emotion; for if I can verbalize to myself the judgment which contradicts my emotion, it would seem to be more than dispositional. This picture is even less plausible than the first one. Here the claim must be that I am either simultaneously or in rapid succession making contradictory judgments about the equality of blacks. For in my self-talk I offer myself the evidence the possession of which is the very best evidence I can have that I judge blacks to be my equals; but I offer this to myself precisely because I judge blacks not to be my equals. I do not want to deny that this ever happens; but the overall state of mind described here is extremely irrational- far more so than that of the typical person who tries to talk himself out of his racist emotions. It is much more plausible to think that I remind myself of this evidence, not to change any judgment I hold about blacks, but to change the way I am "seeing" some of them. 2. Joel Marks suggests another way to refute the thesis that emotions are identical with a certain kind of judgment (in the case of his theory, a belief accompanied by a strong relevant desire). The obvious objectionto my theory of emotion is that it is possible to have a [belief/desire] set characterizedby strong desire and yet not have an emotion. My reply to this objectionis simply to challenge the objector to come up with a counterexample to my claim.2' Let us accept Marks's challenge. Can I believe that I have culpably erred, and have at the same time a strong desire to be morally upright, without feeling guilty? If we allow dispositional beliefs and desires, obviously I can. For I may believe that I have morally offended, yet not be attending to that fact sufficiently to be feeling guilt. This is perhaps why Solomon prefers the word 'judgment" to "belief" for characterizing emotions. Can I, then, judge that I am guilty and at the same time care deeply about not being guilty, without having the emotion of guilt? This seems less likely, and yet it is psychologically possible. My judgment that I am guilty might

2'Marks, op. cit., p. 238. 197

This content downloaded on Thu, 24 Jan 2013 16:37:19 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

ROBERT C. ROBERTS

be a more or less remote inference from other facts, and thus my guilt might not come home to me in the way that it must if I am to this despite the fact that I care have the emotion of guilt-and deeply about being morally upright. To put the matter in terms of the present account, the judgment and desire turn into an emotion only when they bring me to construe myself and my situation in their terms. Marks might respond that no matter how little -or how weakly I construe myself in terms of the judgment, still the fact that both the judgment and the desire are in place guarantees that there will be a feeling of guilt. And that, if the subject does not have a conscious feeling of guilt, then this feeling must be subconscious. This move, however, would smell strongly like a desperate resort to ad hoc hypothesis. 3. I have argued elsewhere22 that emotions cannot be identified with any judgments because a rational person has more options with respect to his emotions than he has with respect to his judgments. He can control his emotions to an extent, and in a way, that it would be unfitting for a person to control his judgments. Consider: I am standing on a wobbly ladder, doing something important enough to warrant the risk to my bodily well-being. My judgment regarding the danger I am in is rational. And my fear is intense enough to impede me from doing the job I am on the ladder to do; so that, other things being equal, it is rational for me to try to mitigate my fear. On the judgment theory, to mitigate my fear-is to change my judgment about the situation, in one of two ways: I might deny it, thus replacing it with another, incompatible judgment; or I might cease to make it without denying it (letting the judgment sink to a dispositional belief by "putting it out of my mind"). In the situation I have described it will be epistemically irrational for me to deny that the situation is dangerous (for I know that it is dangerous). But equally, it will be practically irrational to put the danger out of my mind; I must keep the danger in mind so as to avoid it as far as possible. If my judgment is rational and importantly relevant to the situation, rationality usually requires that I keep it as is. However, it is not irrational to try to

221n "Solomon On the Control of Emotions." My example there is

anger.

198

This content downloaded on Thu, 24 Jan 2013 16:37:19 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

WHAT AN EMOTION IS: A SKETCH

mitigate my fear so as to be able better to do the task that needs to be done. It might be replied that this argument doesn't show that emotions aren't judgments, but only that the world allows for "tragic" in which to do what is rational in one respect is situations-ones necessarily to do what is irrational in another. But situations demanding self-control of emotions are not typically "tragic." I do not need to cease judging the situation to be dangerous to cease feeling afraid. To cease feeling afraid (or start feeling less afraid), I need to refocus the situation in some appropriate way. If, for example, my task on that wobbly ladder is to rescue my little daughter from the third-story window of our burning home, I need to focus on getting her safely to the ground. Instead of construing the situation as a threatto my well-being-say in terms of an image of myself plummeting 25 feet to the pavement-I construe it as a rescue task-say in terms of an image of walking down that ladder with my daughter safely in my arms. The former construal is a form of fear, while the latter is not; both are quite compatible with the judgment that my daughter and I are severely endangered.23 It is within my psychological repertoire24 as a rational chooser to construe the situation in these two, and an indefinite number of other,25 ways; and it is in virtue of this optionality of construal that I have emotional options. It is far less often within my repertoire as a rational chooser to decide to modify my judgments or even just to abandon them; if I am a rational person,

23Construals, and consequently emotions, can be mixed: I can see going up the ladder bothas a threat to my well-being and as the prosecution of a rescue task. But to mix the latter construal with the former is to mitigate the fear, because the two construals are, while not logically contrary, psychological "opposites." 241t seems that the virtue of courage, which can in part be thought of as a skill of fear-management, can be prospered by increasing one's construal repertoire for fearsome situations. The courageous person has construal options, and thus emotional flexibility, that the coward lacks. For a discussion, along these lines, of courage and related virtues, see my "Will Power and the Virtues," The PhilosophicalReview 93 (1984), pp. 227-247. 251f I take an athletic view of situations calling for courage, I may construe this one as an opportunity to test my mettle; as a religious believer, I may construe the situation as being in the hands of God; if I have a flair for the dramatic aspects of things, I may see myself in heroic terms; etc.

199

This content downloaded on Thu, 24 Jan 2013 16:37:19 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

ROBERT C. ROBERTS

judgments are almost entirely forced upon me, in any given situation, being required by evidence and logic.26 What then is the relationship between judgments and emotions? Proposition #4 at the beginning of this paper states that typically an emotion depends on the subject believing some state of affairs to obtain, and it is plausible to assume that the beliefs in question are also typically episodic-that is, that they are judgments. But we must now try to specify more precisely what relations emotions bear to judgments. Let us begin by turning our attention again to feelings. Stephen Leighton correctly asserts that "the cognition appropriate to a given emotion may be overruled or trumped in such a fashion that the emotion present is other than what the judgments would suggest. Instead, the emotion present is what it is by virtue of the feelings present."27 But he does not attempt any positive account of emotional feelings. Despite his desire to give feelings their due, he clings to the notion, found in Lyons, Kenny, Trigg, and others, that feelings of emotion are something like sensations. Nevertheless, he thinks we can recognize emotional feelings by their character,and not only by their association with typical judgments. He asks us to imagine a bizarre case in which "one made the evaluations relevant to grief and this leads to or causes the person to feel vaguely as one does after an orgasm,"28 and rightly points out that we would deny this to be a feeling of grief, just because it doesn'tfeel like one. The supposition seems to be that we recognize the feeling of grief in the same way we recognize the post-orgasmic feeling. But the latter is a feeling of general condition, a non-intentional feeling, while the feeling of grief, even if "contrary to one's better judgment," is intentional. I am not sure how to characterize how we recognize a feeling of general condi-

26Thus Calhoun reverses the truth when she argues that "a cognitive emotion is a paradox" (op. cit., p. 330) because on a conceptual map "belief" belongs with "responsibility" and "activity," while "emotion" belongs with "passive" and "involuntary." Solomon's voluntarism of the emotions is closer to the truth. Emotions are to a larger extent within our voluntary control, and thus within the scope of our immediate responsibility, than our beliefs. 27Leighton, op. cit., p. 308. 28Ibid., p. 312.

200

This content downloaded on Thu, 24 Jan 2013 16:37:19 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

WHAT AN EMOTION IS: A SKETCH

tion, but it seems clear enough that we recognize what emotionwe are feeling by knowing how we are "viewing" things. (Sometimes we infer this knowledge from evidence such as our behavior, our circumstances, the state of our intestines-and also from "feelings" in the sense of visceral sensations.) In his enthusiasm to establish the independency of feelings from judgments, Leighton gives us no account of the positive connection between emotional feelings and the judgments that are typical of emotion-for example, the connection between the feeling of anger at A and the judgment that A has culpably done something offensive. Leighton leaves the impression that there is no further accounting for the fact that a feeling of anger feels like anger. The construal theory, by contrast, gives an account of this positive connection: Namely that emotional feelings are intentional states having a propositional content even if that content is not affirmed as it would be if a judgment over it were also involved. So one very central connection between emotions and beliefs is that they share a propositional content. Following proposition #4, we can say that a person B who is angry at A usually believes that A has culpablyoffended. In the unusual cases in which B does not believe this proposition, he still sees A as having culpablyoffended.The proposition which in the usual case is believed, in this case only shapes or "informs" B's construal. Since the construal is a necessary condition for the emotion's occurring, while the judgment is not, emotions are better thought of as construals than as beliefs or judgments. The presence of a propositional content in emotions is not the only source of the temptation to think they are a type ofjudgment. A construal is an emotion only if it has a certain degree of seriousness, and the seriousness of a construal is easily mistaken for the truth-asserting character of a judgment. A construal is serious when it is compelling, when it has the appearance of truth. If I am angry at my 2-year-old for smearing catsup on her Sunday dress, then even though I hold a theory of moral development that rules out her being culpable for this heinous act, I construe the situation as one in which a responsible agent has culpably offended. She looks guilty to me. The construal has me in its grip, even though I deny the corresponding judgment. By contrast, a construal can also be idling (unserious, lacking verisimilitude), as when we "entertain" one construal of a situation after another. 201

This content downloaded on Thu, 24 Jan 2013 16:37:19 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

ROBERT C. ROBERTS

CONCERNS

The concept of a concern is essential to my account of emotion, so I must comment briefly on it and answer a question raised by it. I use "concern" to denote desires and aversions, and the attachments and interests from which many of our desires and aversions derive. Concerns can be biological ("instinctive," "natural") or learned, general or specific, ultimate or derivative, and dispositional or occurrent. The aversion to bodily damage and death is presumably biological and thus universal, as is a concern to be estimable; by contrast, the concerns to avoid cancer and to be esteemed for one's philosophical works are learned and culturerelative. A concern to be a success in business is general, compared with the specificity of a concern to succeed in a particular business deal. My attachment to my daughter may be ultimate in that it can be given as a reason for other concerns, while no others can be given as a reason for it; concerns for which it can be given as a reason (for example, to have the house fire-safe) are in this way derivative from it. If I am concerned to have the house fire-safe without having it in mind, my concern is dispositional; if I have it in mind, it is occurrent. An important way dispositional concerns rise to occurrence is by being taken up into emotions in the way I described in the section on construals. All the above categories of concerns, save merely dispositional ones, can ground emotions. Some have suspected my account of being viciously circular. It analyzes emotions by reference to concerns, they worry, while concerns are themselves emotions. I must, of course, hold that connot cerns-at least the ones with which I explain emotions-are emotions. But why might one think that concerns are emotions? exOne reason might be that emotions involve concerns-for ample, a fearful person has a concern to get out of this danger's way. But this does not show that the concern is the fear, or any other emotion. And besides, it is not that concern by reference to which I explain fear, but the more general concern to avoid damage to oneself; it becomes the more specific desire to avoid this present perceived danger only in virtue of the construal of the
situation.

Another reason is that a number of items that are classified, in ordinary discourse, as emotions, do seem to be concerns. Examples

202

This content downloaded on Thu, 24 Jan 2013 16:37:19 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

WHAT AN EMOTION IS: A SKETCH

are love, hate, disgust, and revulsion. The reader may have noted that my list of emotions at the opening of this paper left out love. "Love," of course, is a pretty mobile term, and in some of its uses it does denote emotions. Compassion, for example, is a form of love which is an emotion. But if we mean the kind of attachment that lovers have for one another, and parents for their children and children for their parents, and good friends for one another, love is not an emotion. The responses characteristic of such attachment are too various and conflicting for it to be an emotion. They can be joy when the beloved is flourishing, indignation when she is insulted, gratitude when she is benefited, fear when she is threatened, hope when her prospects are good, grief when she dies, and much more. Love in this sense is not an emotion, but a disposition to a range of emotions. Which emotion occurs is a function of how the beloved is construed. Another kind of concern that ordinary discourse identifies as an like the opposite of emotion is revulsion or disgust-something love. Here again the ambiguity of these terms encourages their blanket assimilation to emotions. If someone says, "Hearing the Nazi justify himself, I was filled with revulsion," he refers to an emotion. But this is not so clear when he says, "I was disgusted (nauseated) by the stench." If a disgust is a very primitive physiological response to a nauseating odor, then it has no more (or less) claim to be called an emotion than the startle-response or the reflexive withdrawal from something hot. But my intuition about ordinary English tells me that "disgust" is not quite the right word for such a response; "nausea" is better. "Disgust" seems to be robustly appropriate only where there is some "association of ideas." Thus being disgusted at the sight of teeming maggots because of the association of this with a nauseating odor seems to be genuine disgust and also genuine emotion; but the primitive physical aversion to the smell is neither. Instead, the primitive aversion is something on which the construal, and thus the emotion, is based. It is of course true that one emotion can be based on a concern arising out of another emotion. Thus I can feel disappointed at my failure to get revenge against a person at whom I am angry. But my analysis of emotions in terms of concerns is not circular, because there are concerns which are not only not emotions, but not even ingredients in any emotion.

203

This content downloaded on Thu, 24 Jan 2013 16:37:19 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

ROBERT C. ROBERTS

ACTIONS

Proposition #5 says that some emotions beget dispositions to kinds of actions, and that why a person performed an action of a certain kind can thus often be explained by reference to the emotional state he was in. Thus the envier wants to "put down" the envied one; the angry person wants to punish the one he is angry at; the grateful person wants to say "thank you" and return favors; the fearful person wants to get clear of the perceived danger. I distinguish actions from behaviors, which is a broader category. Examples of emotional behaviors that are not typically actions are weeping, smiling, getting a certain lightness in one's step, slouching, lowering one's eyes, getting a dreamy look on one's face. All these behaviors can be actions, and become such when the agent engages in the behavior for some purpose. Typically when a person weeps in grief, he does not do so to any end, in which case his weeping is a behavior but not an action; but he might weep intentionally, and then his behavior is an action. However, when behaviors which are not typically actions become actions, their relation to the emotion seems to change: A person who weeps intentionally usually does not weep out of grief, but either to simulate it or to workit up. If he succeeds in working it up, then while the grief is not the initial cause of his weeping, it is possible that he now weeps out of grief. The fact that a behavior typical of an emotion can be undertaken when it does not express the emotion, and that this expression has a tendency to bring the emotion about, is one important basis of our ability to control emotions. If other things are in place weeping can bring on the feeling of grief because weeping fosters the person's construing the situation in griefterms. The category of behaviors shades off into another, that of physiological responses such as increased heart rate or blood pressure, perspiring, muscle tension, erection of hairs, trembling, cessation of salivation, etc. Most of these can be performed as actions, if at all, only after specialized training. I shall have more to say about these bodily states in the next section. At the moment I am interested in how the construal theory fares in explaining how envy, anger, etc. can beget dispositions to act in characteristic ways. This is my explanation: The concern or concerns on which the emotion is "based" are shaped and focused by 204

This content downloaded on Thu, 24 Jan 2013 16:37:19 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

WHAT AN EMOTION IS: A SKETCH

the construal into a desire for a certain kind of action. How does the construal theory explain that "put-downs" are actions characteristic of envy? In envying a colleague his philosophical prowess I construe him as a successful rival in a competition for self-esteem, and correlatively myself as a loser in this competition. The emotion is of course premised on the desire to think well of myself and in particular to ground my thinking well of myself in my superior philosophical powers. Thus the "logic" of envy entails that by lowering his estimability I raise mine. In envy the concern for my selfesteem gets transfigured, through the terms in which I focus the situation, into the desire to "put down" my rival. Acts of punishment and retaliation are characteristic of anger, and this is explained by the concepts in terms of which the angry person construes the situation, along with the desire or desires on which the emotion is based. To be angry at someone is to construe him as having culpably offended in some matter of concern to me. Let us say I am angry at the woman down the street for encouraging her dog to use my lawn as a defecation site. Certain actions take on allure: For example, wrapping the products of several days' walks and mailing them to her C.O.D. My anger is based on my concern about the state of my lawn, as well as a concern that my rights and property be respected. To see her, then, as one who has culpably violated my lawn and my rights, is to see her as one who requires to be punished. To want to do something like send that package is a "logical" consequence of being concerned with my lawn and my rights, plus seeing my neighbor as one who has culpably offended in these particulars. An emotion is shaped by some propositional content. In the above examples such contents would be that colleague is ahead of me in the competition for self-esteem,or thatpaper gives him the upper hand, or she has violated my lawn and my rights. Concernful construals shaped by such propositional contents, seriously taken, naturally beget wishes and intentions to perform actions.
BODILY STATES

Earlier I agreed with a popular criticism of feeling theories, which says that an emotion cannot be a physiological sensation because emotions are intentional states and such sensations are not. Now I shall explore how bodily sensations are related to emotions. 205

This content downloaded on Thu, 24 Jan 2013 16:37:19 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

ROBERT C. ROBERTS

A promising direction is suggested by Stanley Schachter and Jerome Singer in their famous study.29 In an effort to show that awareness of emotion is more than awareness of a physiological condition, they gave subjects an adrenaline injection, which mimics the visceral commotion characteristic of emotions. Then they attempted to introduce varying "cognitive" factors among subgroups of these subjects, in hopes that emotions would vary with the different "cognitions." Some of the subjects were informed of the injection's effects, others were misinformed, and to others they gave no information at all; to a fourth group they gave a placebo injection. To introduce "cognitions" they subjected the subjects to stooges, some of them to one who acted out anger about a questionnaire that the subjects themselves were to fill out (and which was quite offensive!), and others to another stooge who acted out euphoria. They found that subjects who were misinformed or uninformed about the cause of their visceral commotion were more likely to feel either euphoric or angry (depending on which stooge they got) than subjects who were informed about the cause of the commotion (and who thus had a non-emotional "explanatory label" for their state), or given only a placebo injection (and thus did not have, presumably, any visceral disturbance to "label"). They concluded that one labels, interprets, and identifies this stirred-up state in terms of the characteristicsof the precipitatingsituation and one's apperceptive mass.... The cognition, in a sense, exerts a steering function. Cognitions arising from the immediate situation as interpreted by past experience provide the framework within which one understands and labels his feelings. It is the cognition which determines whether the state of physiological arousal will be labeled as 'anger', joy', 'fear', or whatever.30 One reading of their view is that neither the sensation nor the "cognition" is, in itself, to be identified with the emotion; nor is the connection between these two merely causal. The emotion itself is

29"Cognitive, Social, and Physiological Determinants of Emotional State," in Richard A. King, ed., Readings for An Introduction to Psychology (New York, N.Y.: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1966), pp. 246-267. 30Ibid., p. 247. 206

This content downloaded on Thu, 24 Jan 2013 16:37:19 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

WHAT AN EMOTION IS: A SKETCH

the sensation as focused or experiencedin termsof the cognition. Thus they can be read as having an incipient construal theory. Though Schachter and Singer use their data against a Jamesian feeling theory,3' nevertheless a vestige of this theory remains in their belief that the focus of the consciousness of emotion is the bodily arousal, or "feeling," as they call it. It is what gets labelled in terms of the available "cognition." But this account distorts the phenomenology of emotion. No doubt it sometimes happens that I feel a sensation (say a burning in my midsection), and then, upon consulting my situation (I have an exam tomorrow) recognize the sensation as a symptom of anxiety. And I may even say I recognized the sensation as anxiety, meaning that I recognized, by its help, that I was anxious. But it is not usual, and certainly not universal, for the sensation to be focused on in this way. If there is any question of "labelling" something when I am angry, it is either the offender (the dirty rat) or the offended (poor dear) or perhaps the situation as a whole (what a disaster); it is not usually any sensation I may be feeling in my body. Schachter's and Singer's theory builds a falsely introspective character into emotion. But I think their construction of their data is suggestive of where physical sensations fit into emotion. Because these sensations are typical of certain emotions (I will not go so far as to assert that they are universally present in emotion, nor even that they are typically present in all emotions), they do get taken up into the construals that we call emotions. Even if in emotion it is not them we "label," still, by their frequent association with emotions they become able to foster our "labelling" the world in emotional ways. Part of the typical "feel" of anxiety (for me, at any rate) is that burning sensation in the mid-section. More of it inclines me the more to see the world as a threatening place. So just as facial behavior (smiling, frowning) can contribute to your emotional disposition by encouraging you to see your situation as worthy of smiles or frowns; and just as actions (saying thank you in a convincing tone of voice, yelling obscenities at the car ahead) can foster construing one person as benevolent or another as an unmitigated

31James thinks that the bodily sensations one experiences in the presence of (for example) a fearsome object, and in consequence of fearbehavior, just are the fear. See William James, The Principles of Psychology, Volume Two, Chapter XXV (New York, N.Y.: Dover Publications, 1950).

207

This content downloaded on Thu, 24 Jan 2013 16:37:19 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

ROBERT C. ROBERTS

jerk; so can the sensation of one's own face blushing enhance one's sense of being in an embarrassing situation. So we might paraphrase Schachter and Singer by way of correction: By encouraging us to construe our situation in a certain way, the physiological arousal exerts a steering function on the emotion. Why are people inclined to identify emotions with physical sensations? Experimental psychologists no doubt find bodily states attractive because they are more readily measurable than other factors. But the mistake is not just a professional liability; ordinary people can be easily induced, with a few leading questions, to think they feel their emotions in their bodies. The reason, I think, is that these sensations are conceptually simpler and easier to identify than the emotions themselves. This homely theory is just an instance of our pre-reflective tendency to alight on the simple and obvious. Our concern-based construals of ourselves, others, and our situations, are shaped by many different kinds of factors: By our beliefs and judgments, desires and attachments, habits of attention, bodily sensations, our behavior, actions, mental images, and the concepts available to us-as well as, no doubt, the objective character of ourselves, others, and our situations. The variety of factors influencing our emotions and proceeding from them has led some thinkers to adopt a component view of what an emotion is. Thus Marks holds that emotions are belief/desire sets and says in a note that 'sets' is not meant to imply the existence of anything other than the component belief(s) and desire(s)."32 Leighton refers to "the . . . features of the complex that are said to be emotion."33 Calhoun speaks of "the constituents of emotion (beliefs, behavior, 'feels', desires, and so on)," and "constituentstages of emotion."34 But as Wittgenstein comments, "That there is a fear-syndrome of sensations, thoughts etc. (for example) does not mean that fear is a syndrome [Konglomerat]."35 And one of my opening propositions reads
''

7. Emotions are typically experienced

as unified states of

32Marks, op. cit., p. 241. 33Leighton, op. cit., p. 303. 34Calhoun, op. cit., p. 328, note; her italics. 35Zettel, edited by G. E. M. Anscombe and G. H. von Wright, translated by G. E. M. Anscombe (Oxford, England: Basil Blackwell, 1967), ?502. 208

This content downloaded on Thu, 24 Jan 2013 16:37:19 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

WHAT AN EMOTION IS: A SKETCH

mind, rather than as sets of components (for example, a belief + a desire + a physiological perturbation + some behavior). If this phenomenological claim is true, then it would seem that a theory of emotion would be preferable, other things being equal, which showed how all these factors feed into and are taken up in, some one kind of state of mind which can be called emotion. I hope to have shown that the theory that emotions are serious concernbased construals does just that.36 Wheaton College

36Thankyou to Alan Donagan, Steve Evans, and Arthur Holmes for prods in connection with an earlier draft of this paper, and members of the Wheaton Summer Philosophy Seminar for stimulatingdiscussion; to the anonymous donors who made the Seminar possible for financialsupReviewfor very port of the writing;and to two readers for ThePhilosophical helpful suggestions and criticisms. 209

This content downloaded on Thu, 24 Jan 2013 16:37:19 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Vous aimerez peut-être aussi